But I still can’t find a report on how much that remodelling cost. This reminds me of a frequent problem with FOIA activism. It often ends up being a meta-discussion about whether or not you can get the records and lost in all this are the records you tried to get. That’s because by the time the agency that refused to hand over the documents is ordered to do so by a court, the relevance of the underlying issue that provoked the FOIA request in the first place has evaporated.

(That’s not true here because California has a budget crisis so spending in the state’s troubled court system will remain of interest for a long time.)